The Writing Site of Duane Gundrum

What’s Happening With Duane?

So, it’s been a little while since I’ve updated the page, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy. Since the last times I was posting, I found myself getting involved in a lot of things that aren’t exactly blog related, but just seem to be a little more significant to what’s going on with my life right now.

First, I’ve been getting involved with Youtube. And I mean, a lot of Youtube. I don’t just mean watching it either. I’ve also been producing content as well. I’ve been doing, well, what you’d expect, and that’s Youtubing all about writing. Yes, I’ve been offering tips on how to become a writer. You can see one of those here:

I’ve also been producing content on politics, as you’d probably expect. Here’s one of my selections on the Kavanaugh hearings:

And then, of course, where would be without the constant bad humor of Duane?

The beauty of my channel is that it covers all sorts of thoughts on the spectrum. If you want to subscribe to my channel, just go here.

Speaking of Youtube, I’ve discovered it’s turning out to be a lot more interesting than anything that’s being produced on television. Over the Winter break, I found myself more interesting in Youtube content than anything that was on television. Never thought I’d say that before. The one problem with that is that you can easily be sucked into rabbit hole content. By which, I mean all sorts of conspiracy theories and ridiculous content that has no basis in reality whatsoever.

One of my favorite recent diversions has been all things ASMR. In case you’re not aware of what this is, it’s a technical term (you can look it up) for content that consists of people whispering and making sounds. It’s supposed to trigger responses from certain people, and it can be very soothing. I found it while looking for videos to help me sleep some time back, and now I’ve been down the rabbit hole numerous times and in various ways. Some better than others….

The content can be fun, interesting and sometimes just outright bizarre. In some cases, the content can be a bit risque.

Another diversion has been partisan types of behavior. Now, most people know I’m a bit of a fiscal conservative but politically I’m more of an anarchist. And I’m also an avid gamer. So, I found myself attracted to content that I thought was about removing political content in computer games, only to discover a whole new rabbit hole of rabid conservatives who hate anything that might be construed as liberal. And rather than be turned off by it, I’ve found myself completely fascinated by it. One of my favorites is a site called The Quartering, which is basically a game news site that tends to be geared against partisan behavior in gaming, but quite often goes off the deep end and becomes partisan in his own way, even though I don’t think he even realizes he’s doing it (or he’d deny it because he’s fallen into that grey area of where a partisan person thinks everyone who disagrees with him is partisan (although he’s usually a lot better than that and can put forth some fascinating content)). Here’s one of his recent ones. Again, it’s one of those things that is better to watch with an open mind.

One of the problems of a lot of this content (and the previous one is usually absent of this problem, which is why I watch it so often), is that the content creators often start to fall into dangerous territory that is quite negative, and quite often you don’t realize it’s gone there until it just has. An example: I was watching one feed of some guy that was railing against liberal women who hate men (which, for bizarre reasons I had been fine with up until that point), and then he started going off on George Soros and “their desire to control everything”, and you might just get the point that sometimes they go too far, and you have to stop watching videos from that sort of content creator.

But one of the more interesting fascinations I’ve had is with a whole movement I’d never heard of before that seems a lot more popular than I’d ever realized, and that’s the MGTOW movement. For several videos, I kept seeing those letters and had no idea what they meant. And then one content creator explained: Men Going Their Own Way. It appears that in this movement, men have gotten frustrated with women and their liberal ways, and their desires to control both men and their interactions with them, to the point of creating all sorts of horrible processes in the dating community. So, mean have just decided to give up on the whole thing and go their own way and ONLY date women not like that.

The videos I’ve seen from a lot of the guys tend to be really negative and angry. But what’s really caught my interest is the number of videos from women who have been responding to this, creating a whole bizarre conversation back and forth that just seems like bad French poetry. And then, recently, I’ve come across a lot of response videos from women who appear to actually support the movement, and that slowly led to the realization that it’s yet another ultra-conservative movement because the majority of these people tend to be right-wing, angry people who see the attempts by liberals to force social customs upon everyone else. Of course, I’m painting this with a very wide brush, so not everyone falls into just those categories, but enough do to make the movement very hard to watch without that constraint.

This caused me to find an off shoot of that movement that is basically a response to a lot of the parameters set in today’s dating society that seems more focused on science-based understanding, showing that both socially and biologically that women and men are on the same trajectories but with different time periods, based on a belief that both are approaching what’s called The Wall (women at a younger age and men at an age approaching the 40s). A good explanation of this comes from a video by a person who goes by the studio of Entrepreneurs in Cars.

Anyway, there are all sorts of rabbit holes you can find yourself going into with this type of stuff. Thankfully, I’m here for you doing that sort of work so you don’t have to. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.